[governance] Mandatory and non-mandatory governance (Was: China To Launch Alternate Country CodeDomains]

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 05:47:52PM +0100,
 Wolfgang Kleinwächter <wolfgang.kleinwaechter at medienkomm.uni-halle.de> wrote 
 a message of 18 lines which said:

> "non-controversial" and have nothing to do with internet core
> ressources, oversight and "enhanced cooperation". The two proposed
> subjects are "spam" and "multiligualism". Very nice proposal. We
> should support "multiligualism" as a first priority.

I will certainly be classified as the bad guy but I do not agree that
multilingualism should be regarded as a priority IN A GOVERNANCE
discussion. To explain why I think so, I have to go back on what
governance is.

There are two different sorts of political problems on the
Internet. Those where a central governance is *mandatory* or things
simply stop to work. DNS root management and IP address allocation are
two typical examples (setting up technical standards, at least part of
them such as the layer 3 protocol, is probably another). Two resources
cannot have the same name or the same address, so you ultimately need
a central authority, the root. The management of this root is a
political problem, so you *need* some form of governance (wether it is
ICANN, ITU, a new body, etc).

Then you have problems where a central, international action could be
*nice* and *useful* but is not mandatory for things to work. Spam is a
typical example. Search engines could be another so that people are
not too dependent on a private US corporation (many people who despise
ICANN for this reason blindly use Google).

At last you have some issues where it is not even clear if a central
action is a good idea. Multilingualism is a typical example. What
could an international organization do in that field? There are a lot
of things to do in the Internet to make it more accessible for the
non-English speaker: translating software, creating content, etc. But
is there one thing which *requires* or even would benefit from a
central action? I doubt it.

So, for the third category (problems where a central action is not
a good idea), the IGF, or any other international structure, is not
needed.

For the second category, it could be said that an international, open,
efficient, democratic, structure would be at least "nice to
have". But, since there is currently no such structure (I regard as
self-evident that ICANN and ITU are extremely far from it), and since
we do not see a new one coming soon, I doubt that it would be a good
thing to include these things in the agenda.

So, I believe that the IGF or similar efforts should stick with
"mandatory governance", the things that *must* be decided centrally.


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